Ex-logging worker talks sustainable forestry

Jimmie McKay talks in his home in Frenchtown, Mont., on Jan. 12, 2013. After a career working in a wood products industry that he knew wasnít sustainable, McKay took the opportunity after being laid off from a Smurfit-Stone Container plant in Frenchtown to return to college at the University of Montana in Missoula, Mont.,and study methods to help better manage and conserve forest resources. (AP Photo/Missoulian,Kurt Wilson)

FRENCHTOWN, Mont. (AP) — When Jimmie McKay was a kid growing up in Libby, the logging roads ran up the river valleys. When he answered the draft in 1971, the roads had reached the base of the mountains.

When McKay returned home in 1979, his tour in Vietnam complete, the logging roads had crossed the mountain tops. The big white and ponderosa pine trees, sometimes measuring four feet in diameter, were gone.

“These were the typical trees they were cutting back then,” McKay said, pointing to a black-and-white image depicting a massive load of logs hauled by the J. Neils Lumber Co., a division of the St. Regis Paper Co., in 1961. “I used to go hunting in there when I was a kid and marvel at those big trees. But they’re not there anymore.”

Gone with the giant trees is the equally giant industry that cut them. Champion International is gone, along with J. Neils Lumber. The Stimson Lumber mills have closed, along with the pulp factory that employed McKay for more than 20 years.

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When Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. shuttered in December 2009, McKay found himself out of work. The industry that had employed his father and friends, in the woods and at the mills and factories, had been reduced to a footnote in Montana’s history books.

“When I was a kid, a logging load in Libby was four logs,” McKay said. “They cut the big trees and ran over the rest to get to the big trees. That’s not sustainable. I knew eventually that sustainable practices would have to show up.”

After Smurfit-Stone shut down, McKay took advantage of the Federal Trade Adjustment Act to obtain his master’s degree at the University of Montana. He defended his professional paper recently and may now have a hand in developing the sustainable forestry practices he envisioned decades ago.

Returning to the university seemed an unlikely choice for a guy pushing 60. But McKay had a lot of experience on the industry side of the forestry equation. He watched the philosophies taught in college play out in the real world. He felt he had something to offer and even more to learn.

Now, he might just have another act left in what’s been a life of many acts; scenes filled with the setbacks and achievements of a blue-collar man who, for most of his life, has chased a hard-earned dollar.

“There’s no more new frontier,” McKay said. “We have to learn how to share.”

To understand McKay’s philosophies and his drive to shape the future of sustainable forestry, you have to understand his past.

Dressed in suspenders and wearing a University of Wyoming Cowboys cap — his wife Lindsay is from Rawlins, Wyo. — McKay explains how he graduated from Libby High School and answered the draft in 1971 to serve in Vietnam.

He returned to Montana after his discharge and witnessed drastic landscape changes brought on, he believes, by an insatiable timber industry. He attended UM where he earned a degree in forestry resource management.

“I was originally thinking of going into private work with the lumber company,” he said. “It was my background growing up in Libby. Most of my family worked for the St. Regis Paper Co., and I was kind of interested in Champion International.”

Champion was the biggest game around, but even by the 1970s, McKay had seen the writing on the wall. The timber industry had begun a slow but steady decline. So by 1984, looking for work, he signed on not with Champion, but with Smurfit-Stone.

McKay started with the cleanup crews and climbed the ranks to run the paper machines. He worked as a safety captain and toiled as a kiln operator, using sodium hydroxide to digest pulp. But the paper industry couldn’t escape the fate of the timber industry and, again, McKay faced an uncertain future.

Many old-timers, as McKay sometimes calls them — he himself may be one of them — have taken a more cynical view of past decades and the changes brought to western Montana’s once largest industry. He understands the bitterness behind the loss and even sympathizes with it, though he looks at things differently.

“We’re kind of in a renaissance in western Montana and we have been for the last 40 years — since they started passing environmental legislation, NEPA, the Endangered Species Act and the roadless rules,” he said. “It put a lot of barriers on timber production, but rightly so.”

The changes were generations in the making. McKay tells of his father’s days, when the government gave away the nation’s resources for free, timber included.

By the 1960s, he says, there was nothing more to give and nothing more to take. The industries fought the changes - the logging restrictions placed on federal lands. They began logging their own private land, but soon enough, that too had nothing more to offer.

The timber giants like Plum Creek would eventually shift to real estate. McKay watched it happen, just as he watched the big trees disappear. The giants in the woods he’d known as a kid would not return, he knew, unless changes were made to how things were done.

The executives at Smurfit-Stone stayed positive to the end. McKay says no CEO in the world would ever say his company was failing six months before it did.

When the paper plant shuttered, McKay took stock of his situation. Knowing the end was near — watching the trends — he paid off his bills. He lived frugally to do it and braced for the struggles ahead.

Most of the plant’s workers were in their 40s and 50s. A new beginning was hard to imagine, even for McKay, who said he has always managed an open mind and a flexible perspective.

Out of work and nearly 60, going back to UM to earn a master’s degree was still a possibility. The Trade Adjustment Act could help pay the way, he learned, so why not give it a try?

“I would not have been able to go to graduate school if not for these programs and federal support,” said McKay. “It was pretty unbelievable how accommodating everyone was. You go to school to begin a 40-year career. You don’t do a 40-year career to go back to school.”

So there he was, a man who should consider retirement, sitting among 20-something college kids asking about the working world of forestry. McKay had sat in their shoes 40 years earlier. He’d since been to war. He’d known the loggers and he’d worked the mills. He’d seen the industry they were studying in textbooks operate on the ground amid changing politics.

“I did give a lot of pep talks to the kids,” McKay said. “I call them kids but they’re young adults. This is their future. The older generation, they’re still remembering how it was, the free-for-all with timber and the good times. But for the younger people, this will be in their hands.”

McKay has no problem with the U.S. Forest Service serving as a land owner, so far as management is collaborative and operates lockstep with the community. He has no problem with land conservancies buying up property and turning it over to the government to help consolidate ownership.

He names the places across Montana where this has happened and says the successes have helped do away with the checkerboard ownership that has caused foresters such headaches when it comes to contiguous management.

McKay’s thesis at UM focused on the Southwest Crown Collaborative — an experimental project working to sustain ecosystems while providing economic and social benefits across a large swatch of western Montana.

Jobs lost from the closure of the Stimson Lumber mills and Smurfit-Stone, the decline of the timber industry and the threats to the landscape, its wildlife and healthy forests, are challenges needing new, imaginative solutions.

And that has kept McKay interested and involved.

“I’m really into collaborative forest landscape restoration,” he said. “Community forestry, I guess. I see that in our future. I realize it’s federal land, but it’s here to sustain and help people throughout the nation. That’s what federal land is, and it’s not a bad thing.”